Dismayed by life and on the verge of starvation, 31-year-old Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun (born 4 August 1859) changed the course of literary history when he wrote Hunger (1890) (https://tinyurl.com/ya4ng5wh), a novel of shocking, unprecedented hyper-realism about a starving writer’s struggle to survive.

Hamsun would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920 and became a living legend in Norway; only to end his life in infamy and disgrace, his memory forever tarnished in the eyes of his countrymen by his support of the Nazi occupiers and the puppet Quisling government during World War II.

What immediately strikes the reader of Hamsun is not only the psychological complexity of his writing (reminiscent of Dostoyevsky), but the fineness but also sheer strangeness of the perceptions of his characters.

As Swedish translator Edwin Björkman writes in a preface to Hunger, hearing of Hamsun’s psychological complexity we might expect him to be a man of the people, but “instead he must be classed as an individualistic romanticist and a highly subjective aristocrat [ed. note: in psychology maybe, but in actual fact he came from the deepest poverty], whose foremost passion in life is violent, defiant deviation from everything average and ordinary. He fears and flouts the dominance of the many, and his heroes, who are nothing but slightly varied images of himself, are invariably marked by an originality of speech and action that brings them close to, if not across, the borderline of the eccentric.”

Norwegian literature had writers who tackled social issues like poverty before, but no one was prepared for (or expecting) the uncompromising bleakness of Hunger. Traditionalists found the novel grotesque, but with the coming of modernism and the works of such writers as Joyce and Kafka, it is now possible to see the book as a pioneering work that was way ahead of its time.

Over the next three decades, Hamsun forged his own path, writing books in which he valorized Nature, solitude, and rural life (as judged against the city), culminating in the epic novel The Growth of the Soil (https://tinyurl.com/y8mkyp3s), for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920.

Whereas Hunger had been met with shock and derision in many circles, subsequent books like Mysteries, Pan, and The Growth of the Soil helped establish Hamsun as a hero of Norwegian letters.

By the time he died in 1952, however, Hamsun’s countrymen came instead to regard him differently: as a villain and a traitor.

Hamsun would never be forgiven by many Norwegians for his support of the Nazis and the puppet government of Vidkun Quisling. He was arrested at the end of the war and put on trial for treason; however due to his old age, Hamsun was spared the fate of other Nazi collaborators and was given a hefty fine instead of prison or the death sentence.

Hamsun left behind a complicated legacy. He wrote arguably the first true modernist novel in Hunger, but that same book reveals (I think) that his art was perhaps driven more by raw necessity and egoistic survival instinct that by any larger moral sense.

The early scene where his protagonist stalks and leers at a girl on her way home or the character’s later contempt for the police and God and his fantastic visions show that Hamsun even then always had a creepy side, a side that shifts for itself rather than anyone else.